July 1863 was a momentous month in the Civil War. News of Gettysburg and Vicksburg electrified the North and devastated the South. Sandwiched geographically between those victories and lost in the heady tumult of events was news that William S. Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland had driven Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee entirely out of Middle Tennessee. The brilliant campaign nearly cleared the state of Rebels and changed the calculus of the Civil War in the Western Theater. Despite its decisive significance, few people even today know of these events. The publication of Tullahoma: The Forgotten Campaign that Changed the Course of the Civil War, June 23-July 4, 1863 by award-winning authors David A. Powell and Eric J. Wittenberg, forever rectifies that oversight.
Powell and Wittenberg mined hundreds of archival and firsthand accounts to craft a splendid study of this overlooked campaign that set the stage for the Battles of Chickamauga and Chattanooga, the removal of Rosecrans and Bragg from the chessboard of war, the elevation of Ulysses S. Grant to command all Union armies, and the early stages of William T. Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign. Tullahoma-one of the most brilliantly executed major campaigns of the war-was pivotal to Union success in 1863 and beyond. And now listeners will know precisely why.